Tuesday, 24 May 2016

Learning to love classical music (if you like pop music)

Two years ago a pair of clever, aesthetically sophisticated
artists asked me to help them begin to like classical music. It wasn’t so much that the desire was not
there, but rather that with contemporary culture’s focus on the immediate and
the new it’s easy to avoid exposure to classical music altogether, and therefore not quite know where to find the way in.

I asked for advice from various composers and music
professionals – saying to them that the one thing I was not looking for was a
chronological introduction – more important was music you could relate to if
you knew all about pop music. I was
thinking in part back to how my love of classical music started, which was in about
1984 with Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” – which seemed to me at the
time to share much with the dub reggae I was then listening to – and from which
I worked my way backwards over the years to Bach, only to find then great
similarities between Bach and Reich in terms of compositional structures.

I've spent the last 15 years on my own journey, with great delight filling in the gaps for everything between the Baroque and the Contemporary, discovering the pleasures of Shostakovich one year, and Chopin the next.

This is the order of the music to which I
introduced my artist friends to start them on their own journey:

I felt that once they had experienced
the music above they would be pretty much ready for anything classical music
can offer. As they listen to music in their studio via Spotify, I could see what they were playing ... and I knew they arrived when one of them became addicted to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons".